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Exhibitions - March 2018

Exhibitions - March 2018

Exhibitions:

Daimyo - War Lords of Japan

From 15 February until 13 May 2018Musée Guimet, Paris, France

This spring the Musée Guimets presents a powerful exhibition featuring a spectacular array of armour and accessories highlighting the role and image of the Japanese war lords. An exceptional ensemble, bringing together rare items from both public and private collections. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

New Forms, New Voices – Japanese Ceramics from the Gitter-Yelen Collection

From 4 November 2017 until 13 May 2018New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, U.S.A.

Ceramics have been made in Japan for over 15,000 years. For the first time in over twenty years, NOMA presents an exhibition devoted to modern and contemporary ceramics. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

From Folk to Elevated

From 5 February until 4 May 2018Sociëteit Arti et Amicitae, Amsterdam, the Netherlands

In their Society, Arti shows around one third of the extensive paper rolls from the collection of Peter Poldervaart. Peter Poldervaart was the head restorer of paper at the Rijksmuseum. He traveled to Japan regularly for his work. There he met the best paper makers of the exclusive kozo-paper and got inspired to collect Japanese scroll paintings. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

The Beauty of Silence – The Artwork of Makoto Fujimura

From 24 February until 27 May 2018Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa, Israel

Makoto Fujimura is a contemporary artist. Thanks to the exhibitions, writings, lectures and symposia he conducts throughout the world, he is valued for his impact on culture as well as for his inspiration to both artists and art lovers. The fusion between cultures, between traditional, Japanese art and the fresh contemporary abstract-expressionism is at the heart of Fujimura’s artistic approach. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Shin-hanga – The New Prints

From 24 February until 27 May 2018Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa, Israel

Most of the Japanese artists in the latter half of the 19th century were pupils of Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Utagawa Kunisada, and Utagawa Hiroshige. However, in contrast to their masters of traditional print, who used lyrical colours,, the younger artists preferred brighter colours and dominant shades such as red or purple. This new and heightened use of colour was seen by their contemporaries as resulting from Western influence. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Small IS BEAUTIFUL

From 24 February until 27 May 2018Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art, Haifa, Israel

Traditional Japanese art demonstrates the desire to embellish every tiny object, thus transforming it into an artistic work of aesthetic perfection. Moreover, the great, technical skill and accuracy of detail displayed by the Japanese artists do not interfere with individual expression or the interpretation of legends and folk or religious traditions.For more information about this exhibition, click here.

In Focus – Contemporary Japan

From 23 December 2017 until 12 August 2018Galleries 369, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, U.S.A.

Since the early 1990s, Japan has endured an ongoing economic recession and a series of natural disasters. Artists have responded by co-opting or critiquing rampant consumerism and exploring identity and memory. All the while, they maintain a deep skepticism as to what the future may hold. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Mizusashi – Japanese Water Jars from the Carol and Jeffrey Horvitz Collection

From 23 December 2017 until 13 May 2018Galleries 238 and 239, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, U.S.A.

This selection of 20th- and 21st-century mizusashi highlights two important trends—the perpetuation of longstanding tea traditions alongside the artistry and technical excellence that define modern Japanese ceramics. This exhibition is complemented by a selection of Japanese tea utensils from the turn of the 17th century, on view in Gallery 224. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Lustrous Surfaces

Until 16 September 2019Victoria and Albert Museum, London, U.K.

Featuring 110 objects located throughout the Museum, including shrines, chests and rare Latin American examples, this display highlights the varied manufacturing techniques, surface treatments, decorative styles and application around the world. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

Living Proof – Drawing in 19th-Century Japan

From 3 November 2017 until 3 March 2018Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, U.S.A.

Living Proof features nearly eighty works by artists including Hokusai, Kuniyoshi, and Yoshitoshi. Best known as print designers, their compositions were mediated in the final woodblock print through the contributions of separate carvers and printers. This exhibition thus offers a rare opportunity to witness the artist’s hand directly. Frequent alterations and reworkings of an initial sketch also reveal the various stages in their creative process. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

The Printed Image – The Flowering of Japan’s Woodblock-Print Culture

From 1 March until 1 July 2018Museum für Ostasiatische Kunst Köln, Köln, Germany

The variety and extent of the museum’s collection graphically illustrate the high status enjoyed by the Japanese woodblock print. Its perfection was not only a technical and economic, but above all a cultural and social revolution, which is perhaps comparable to the triumphal march of the computer in the information age. The woodblock print was a brilliant vehicle for conveying a variety of knowledge and information of all kinds to a demanding public hungry for information and enjoyment. It was the medium of a new, modern information culture.For more information about this exhibition, click here.

When Pictures Speak – The Written Word in Japanese Art

Until 19 August 2018Asian Art Museum, San Fransisco, U.S.A.

Words and pictures are often combined in Japanese art, to celebrate poems and stories, express religious teachings, and comment on current events. Though not unique to Japan, the marriage of text and image has flourished there, finding relevance within each new generation of artists, writers, and patrons. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

The Masked Warrior – Battle Stage of the Samurai

From 8 December 2017 until 27 May 2018Japanmuseum SieboldHuis, Leiden, the Netherlands

The focal points in this splendid exhibition will be played by Nō-masks and the masks of the famous Japanese samurai warriors. Spectacular artefacts from international and private collections, including swords, screens, kimonos, helmets and bows, will illustrate the beauty and power of Nō-theatre and the samurai culture. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

Van Gogh & Japan

From 23 March until 24 June 2018Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Though he was active in the 19th century, the artist Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890) remains tremendously popular throughout the world. Having become engrossed in Japanese culture after encountering ukiyo-e prints and literature about the country in Paris during the height of the Japonism boom, Van Gogh saw Japan as a source of creativity and a kind of Utopia. At the same time, in the 1920s, Japanese artists and intellectuals developed an admiration for Van Gogh and began to make pilgrimages to his grave in the French town of Auvers-sur-Oise. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Mesdag & Japan

From 7 March until 17 June 2018The Mesdag Collection, The Hague, the Netherlands

The painter, art collector and businessman Hendrik Willem Mesdag assembled a collection of Japanese decorative art, ranging from Samurai swords to Satsuma vases, around the opening of his Mesdag Museum in 1887. The exhibition Mesdag & Japan: Collecting the Far Eastwill show how Mesdag came into contact with Japanese art in the 19th century, where and how he collected it and how japonisme influenced art in The Hague.For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Hard Bodies – Contemporary Japanese Lacquer Sculpture

From 7 October 2017 until 24 June 2018Minneaplois Institute of Art, Minneapolis, U.S.A.

Since the late 1980s, this tradition has been challenged. A small but enterprising circle of lacquer artists have pushed the medium in entirely new and dynamic directions by creating large-scale sculptures, works that are both conceptually innovative and superbly exploitive of lacquer’s natural virtues. Thirty works by 16 artists comprise the first-ever comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Japanese lacquer sculpture. They have all been drawn from the Clark Collections at Mia, the only collection in the world to feature this extraordinary new form. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

Boundless Peaks – Ink Paintings by Minol Araki

From 7 October 2017 until 24 June 2018Minneaplois Institute of Art, Minneapolis, U.S.A.

Renowned as an industrial designer, Minol Araki (1928–2010) was also a prolific painter with a firm grounding in East Asian painting traditions. Born in China to Japanese parents, and active professionally in New York and Taipei, Araki created an immense body of ink paintings that reimagined tradition and straddled East and West. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

Black and White - Japanese Modern Art

From 30 September 2017 until 3 June 2018Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Mass., USA

Centered around a newly acquired, large-scale calligraphy by Inoue Yūichi (1916–85), this exhibition showcases a selection of avant-garde works in the monochrome aesthetic shared widely in Japan and beyond during the postwar period. This sensibility is rooted in Zen Buddhism, which values simplicity and austerity, and remains influential today. The works in the exhibition are the results of transnational exchanges between Japanese artists like Inoue and their American Expressionist contemporaries, including Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, who drew inspiration from Asian calligraphy for their gestural paintings. Among the nine works on view are prints, ceramics and sculpture, primarily drawn from the MFA’s collection. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

Takashi Murakami - Lineage of Eccentrics

From 18 October 18 2017 Until 1 April 2018Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Mass., USA

A Collaboration with Nobuo Tsuji and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Contemporary works by Takashi Murakami, one of the most imaginative and important artists working today, are juxtaposed with treasures from the MFA’s renowned collection of Japanese art. The exhibition reveals how Murakami’s contemporary vision is richly inflected by a dynamic conversation with the historical past, framed by a creative dialogue with the great Japanese art historian, Professor Nobuo Tsuji. Together, Murakami and Professor Tsuji have chosen the objects on view in the exhibition, including paintings and sculpture created by the artist in direct response to Japanese masterpieces from the MFA’s collection, such as Soga Shōhaku’s 35-foot-long Dragon and Clouds (1763), and the Heiji Scroll (second half of the 13th century)—one of the most famous Japanese works of art outside of Japan. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

A Painting for the Emperor – Japanese Labourers on Sugar Plantations in Hawai’i

From 8 February until 31 May 2018Johan Jacobs Museum, Zürich, Switzerland

In 1885, the King of Hawai‘i commissioned a large oil painting as a gift for the Emperor of Japan--but the painting never reached the Imperial Household. This exhibition displays the painting for the first time outside of Japan, reconstructing its historical context and the lives of its protagonists. The painting serves as a window onto the late-nineteenth century world of the Asia-Pacific region, a world that was transformed by the emergence of Meiji Japan as an international power. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Fired Up – Ink Painting and Contemporary Ceramics from Japan

The element of fire is essential for the creation of two of Japan's oldest and most enduring art forms, ink painting and ceramics. Fired Up: Ink Painting and Contemporary Ceramics from Japanunites these two art forms in a display of works spanning a period of 400 years and features objects infrequently exhibited at the Museum. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Gallery Exhibitions:

Je Suis La Pipe – Naoki Fuku

From 3 February until 10 March 2018SinArts Gallery, Den Haag, the Netherlands

SinArts Gallery has the great pleasure of hosting the first solo show by Naoki Fuku in the Benelux. A preliminary conclusion to Fuku’s Before the 7th series, this exhibition focusses more on his conceptual paintings in which Naoki brings together his criticism of the art world, as well as the world at large, through cynical and colourful compositions. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Contemporary Lacquer by Yoshio Okada and Washi Screens by Kyoko Ibe

From 15 March until 20 April 2018Erik Thomsen Gallery, New York, U.S.A.

Also exhibiting in:On 17 and 18 March 2018JADA 2018 – And Exhibition by the Japanese Art Dealers AssociationUkrainian Institute of America, New York, U.S.A.

Membrane – Genta Ishizuka

From 21 February until 22 March 2018Erskine, Hall & Coe Ltd, London, U.K.

This exhibition, Membrane will feature 21 works in urushi lacquer. Speaking of the meaning behind the title of his exhibition, Ishizuka explains I believe “membrane” is a word that is connected to both my production method that utilizes elastic cloth, as well as the sense of envelopment given by applying the urushi, in the way it covers the whole work like a skin. This word that is used with animals, plants and other organisms also has an affinity with the organic material of urushi, and can mean a kind of skin, connoting physicality. For more information about this exhibition, click here.

Saburo Murakami

From 30 November 2017 until 24 March 2018IBASHO Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present a comprehensive solo exhibition by Saburo Murakami (1925-1996), Japanese painter and pioneer of performance art. The exhibition brings together a large selection of important paintings from the 1950s through the end of the 1960s., featuring works from the artist’s estate alongside generous loans from prominent private collections. For more information on this exhibition, click here.

I’m Only Happy When I’m Naked

From 25 January until 04 March 2018IBASHO Gallery, Antwerp, Belgium

Tokyo Rumando is the artist name of a young Tokyo photographer (1980) who after a career in modelling turned the camera lens on herself. In carefully crafted scenes, she not only creates imagined characters but also delves into all the existing personas in herself. According to Rumando she “is the photographer, the bystander, the performer, the theme as well as the director. Making pictures has no meaning if I cannot present the whole of my world.” For more information on this exhibition, click here.

Auctions:

Bonhams – Asian Art

21 March 2018Edinburgh, SchotlandFor more information on this auction, click here.​

Sotheby's – Asian Art

24 March 2018New York, U.S.A.For more information on this auction, click here.​

Bonhams – Asian Art

9 May 2018Sydney, AustraliaFor more information on this auction, click here.​

Veilinghuis Peerdeman / Utrecht Auctions – Japanese Art

27 May 2018Utrecht, the NetherlandsFor more information on this auction, click here.​

Lempertz – India, South East Asia, Japan (Brussels)

8 June 2018Cologne, GermanyFor more information on this auction, click here.​

Bonhams – Asian Art

11 July 2018Edinburgh, SchotlandFor more information on this auction, click here.​

Bonhams – Asian Art

5 December 2018Edinburgh, SchotlandFor more information on this auction, click here.​